To Pray or Not to Pray: The Mother of God and Saints

Having an evangelical Protestant upbringing and living in a largely evangelical area, the notion of prayers addressing anyone but God the Father (no, seriously) are often regarded with distrust, suspicion, and outright condemnation.

I honestly was confused when I first found myself inside of the evangelical world about the Holy Trinity, and eventually the formula presented was, “Pray IN the Spirit, THROUGH the Son, TO the Father.” Okay, that was nice and all, but I don’t think it’s necessarily THE ONLY way to pray.

Someone asked me recently about what I thought concerning prayers addressing the Blessed Virgin Mary, and I think here I can express my thoughts completely.

My ultimate feelings are that, with regards to spirituality in general, any kind of prayer, practice, or devotion that draws one closer to God is a good thing. However, this must be done within reason. Allow me to try to explain.

If, for instance, a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary were to completely eclipse devotion to God, then the devotion would be defeating the original purpose. The point of being devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary is by virtue of her being the Mother of God.

Prayers to the Saints are a little more foreign to me but nonetheless have an archetypal resonance.

Also, the experience of addressing the Saints is a bit different as well- one naturally doesn’t regard them as being God Himself, and yet in a way, because of Theosis, they are somehow related to God. It’s all very subtle and complicated on the psychological level but makes sense according to the intuition.

Some day, I’ll start creating charts and put them on here to explain things when I can conceived of suitable chart.

Beaux

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I personally pray to all sorts of different deities and subdeities all the time as well as God itself. But I see all deities and subdeities to be ultimately emanations of the One God that is all things.

Yes, and I understand the reasoning underlying that. The central question in Christian theology would be whether or not those entities are distracting one from God; that is the perspective at best, and the perspective at worst is that to honor anything other than God in ANY regard is equivalent to worshiping Satan. So it becomes rather a bother in that regard.

Generally speaking, in Gnostic cosmology, the various emanations of God line up with the various roles the Gods of other traditions embody, although in Gnosticism it tends to go straight to the abstract quality (“Joy” and “Peace” are examples of these emanations) as opposed to being more of a personification. It’s quite interesting, really.